(Morzine, France)

Usually, the sixth day of skiing in a resort involves revisiting the highlights of the previous five days of skiing. However, due to the massive size of the Portes du Soleil region, we found ourselves in a completely new area on our last day.

Before this trip, I had never heard of Châtel, France. But it hosts a fairly extensive set of slopes radiating out in all directions from the town itself. The snow was excellent and we even made it into Switzerland again briefly: one of the lifts starts in France and ends in Switzerland. When you ski down, however, you soon find yourself back in France.

Of course, drama is the theme of this year’s trip…so it was only fitting that we had some more of it during our last day of skiing. This time, a power outage knocked out 4 lifts which we had just taken…and these were 4 lifts that we needed to get back to Morzine! We had to take 2 “navettes” in order to get around the blockage: on the second one, there must have been 100 people on the bus. We were wedged in like rush-hour commuters, with people falling onto each other whenever the bus went around a bend (which was a lot…these are the Alps!). Everybody was in a panic because they were afraid that they wouldn’t make it back before the rest of the lifts closed too.

Anyway, it worked out in the end and we had a very nice lunch at Le Blattin. This is a mountain hut high above Châtel that epitomized “cozy”. I would love to share some pictures of it, but my camera got soaked in the previous day’s rain and wasn’t working. Click here to see a picture that somebody else took.

In fact, I couldn’t take any pictures until the very end of the day. As the terrain and “vibe” was similar, I’m including some more pictures from Portes du Soleil Day 4 instead.

I continued skiing until 5:15 p.m. on the last day, and then caught a bus back to Morzine from the hamlet of Ardent. As the day slipped away, I passed the usual milestones: the last mountain lunch, the last lift, the last piste, the last turn…until I finally had to pop out of my bindings and admit that the skiing portion of my holiday was over.

The Portes du Soleil region is massive. I didn’t get to the areas that were not lift-connected, and I didn’t really get to Mont-Chery, the slopes north and east of Châtel, the slopes north of Morgins, the slopes south of Avoriaz, or some of the slopes above Champery. That might look like a lot, but it pales in comparison to what we did actually see.

Overall, Portes du Soleil gets a passing grade, with bonus marks for the extended lift hours and the unique international aspect of the slopes. If I return here some day, I think I will base myself in one of the Swiss villages and focus on the Châtel and Swiss slopes. They were less busy and also felt more “authentic”, especially on the Swiss side. There was little or no purpose-built mass development, as we saw in Avoriaz (France). It was mayhem passing through the Avoriaz slopes during the late afternoon “rush hour”!

While the skiing part of my trip is now complete, I still have a brief stay in Geneva coming up. Stay tuned!